A Clear And Present Danger

Some countries are messing with our democracy. Michael Harris writes:

Canadian democracy has been weakened this past week by a signal failure of transparency, a dire error of priorities. On an issue of monumental importance, the public was informationally dealt out.

What makes that harder to take is that the Trudeau government never misses an opportunity to take a bow for its openness in governance. The PM talks the talk, but sometimes doesn’t walk the walk.

Thanks to the work of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), Canadians have learned that some Members of Parliament have been helping foreign actors to interfere in this country’s politics and elections.

The NSICOP report released on June 3 said that certain elected officials “began wittingly assisting foreign state actors soon after their election.” The key word is “wittingly.”  

The committee members said that they had seen intelligence suggesting that some MPs worked to influence colleagues on behalf of India, and that they had provided confidential information to officials with the Indian government.  

In one case cited in the report, that relied on information from CSIS, a then-sitting MP had a relationship with a foreign intelligence officer.  

According to the report, the MP even tried to arrange a meeting with a senior foreign intelligence officer in a foreign country. 

Several counties are facing this kind of threat. But if we don't know who is working for these countries -- and not for us -- they represent a clear and present danger. And unless we know who they are, we can't vote them out.

Image: Radio Canada

The MAGA Mob

Michelle Goldberg writes that Donald Trump's Maga Mob has embraced criminality. She refers to a recent interview with Peter Navarro from his Florida jail cell:

This week, Breitbart interviewed the former Trump official Peter Navarro, one of many criminals in the ex-president’s orbit, from the Miami prison where he is serving four months for contempt of Congress. While life behind bars is difficult, Navarro boasted that his stint has been smoothed by his ties to Donald Trump, which make him something of a made man. The former president, said Navarro, is beloved not just by the guards, but by the “vast majority” of inmates as well. “If I were a Bidenite, things would be a lot tougher here — and yes, they know exactly who I am and respect the fact that I stood up for a principle and didn’t bow to the government,” he said.

The entire Republican Party has embraced lawlessness:

One of the more unsettling things about our politics right now is the Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of lawlessness. Even as they proclaim Trump’s innocence, Trump and his allies revel in the frisson of criminality. At his rally in the Bronx last month, for example, Trump invited onto the stage two rappers, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, who are currently facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder and weapons possession. (They’ve pleaded not guilty.) During Trump’s recent criminal trial, his courtroom entourage included Chuck Zito, who helped found the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and spent six years in prison on drug conspiracy charges. (The Justice Department has linked his Hells Angels chapter to the Gambino crime family.) Trump, who has his own history of mafia ties, has repeatedly compared himself to Al Capone. MAGA merchants sell T-shirts — and, weirdly, hot sauce — showing Trump as either Vito or Michael Corleone from “The Godfather” movies, with the caption “The Donfather.”

A fascinating new book by John Ganz, “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s,” offers a useful way to think about the value system undergirding MAGA’s romance with the mob. Ganz’s book excavates a prehistory of Trumpism in the angry, cynical period between the end of the Cold War and the full flush of the Clinton boom. You can see, in the rise of figures like David Duke, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, Trumpism in embryo. (The chapter on Duke, and the cultish loyalty he inspired, is particularly illuminating.) But the most revelatory section — some of which Ganz has adapted in a post for his Unpopular Front newsletter — involves the mystique around the mobster John Gotti and the Buchanan-style paleoconservatives who saw, in the mafia, an admirable patriarchal alternative to the technocratic liberalism they despised.

It's been a long time coming. But it's the symptom of a very sick society. And it's not new:

Societies fetishize Mafiosi to the degree that they lose faith in themselves. Writing about the ideology embedded in the classic crime films of the 1930s, the Marxist social critic Fredric Jameson noted that gangsters “were dramatized as psychopaths, sick loners striking out against a society essentially made up of wholesome people (the archetypal democratic ‘common man’ of New Deal populism).” When, in the 1970s, gangsters instead represented a fantasy of family cohesion, it was a response to a broader climate of social dissolution. It’s a sign that a culture is in the grip of a deep nihilism and despair when moblike figures become romantic heroes, or worse, presidents.

I'm sorry to  end on such a pessimistic note.

Image: Wikipedia

Why Is He Sticking Around?

Justin Trudeau is in trouble. Lots of people wonder why he's sticking around. Michael Harris writes that two new books deal with that question:

Whatever the answer may be, two [books] have just been [published] — a full-length book by Stephen Maher, and a slim volume by Paul Wells. Both ultimately paint the picture of a leader who is washed up.

Maher’s book, The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau, is already a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon in the Kindle edition. And the Wells 96-page essay, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times, has been reviewed as a skilfully written psychological assessment of one of Canada’s longest-serving prime ministers. Neither work will put many smiles on faces in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Wells also portrays the PM as a man who doesn’t deal well with opposition. It’s his way, or the doorway.

“For all his pedigree and physical grace the work of politics has never come easily to him,” Wells writes, adding that “his judgment is often terrible. He has not surrounded himself with great talent; in fact, he has discovered a real gift for chasing talent away.”

Considering what happened to Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott and Gerald Butts, Wells has a point.

The Maher book is much bigger and more extensive:

Maher’s book, at 385 pages, is the first full-length biography of Justin Trudeau, the interest it has already sparked is not surprising. Based on 200 interviews, including one with the PM himself, The Prince offers a trove of inside information that one would expect from the talented journalist who was part of the team that broke the robocalls scandal surrounding the 2011 election.

While Maher was writing the book, I visited with him in his home, a converted boathouse on the back harbour of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Over beer, we talked shop about the challenges of taking on a big book about a Canadian prime minister. I had one piece of advice for him about the complex business of getting a book from concept through to publication, a process in which an author is pushed and pulled in many directions: “Stick to your guns.”

I was struck that day by Maher’s sense of fairness in his assessment of the prime minister. He was not interested in writing a “hate Trudeau” book, although by doing so, it would be easy to cash in on the PM’s plummeting popularity.

When Maher began his work on The Prince, he thought the current PM was a more consequential figure than either Jean Chrétien or Stephen Harper, a high-impact leader who changed the country more than his predecessors.

It was the author’s opinion that history would look kindly on Justin Trudeau. Although that impression changed as his research progressed over 18 months, Maher’s book has been received as a fine example of a traditional journalistic deep dive: exhaustively researched, fair and balanced.

Maher's opinion of Trudeau is now more nuanced. There are two Trudeaus -- the Prince and the Entitled Snob:

Which Trudeau is the real one? The earlier version full of hope and hype, and some big-ticket accomplishments; or the Prince, who can’t get over his own sense of entitlement, even as his tired government seems to have lost its way?

Whether we will ever know the answer to that question depends on what the PM decides to do: walk off undefeated into the lucrative sunset of the speaker’s tour and the corporate boardroom, or stand his ground and fight, despite dismal polls and relentless journalistic epitaphs.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Maher shared a momentous quote on how the PM himself sees his political future. They are fighting words.

“I just see it as such a fundamental choice in what kind of country we are, who we are as Canadians,” Trudeau told Maher. “That, for me, is what I got into politics for: to have big fights like this about who we are as a country and where we’re going.”

Stay tuned.

Finally

 

Yesterday, the law finally caught up with Donald Trump. Dana Milbank writes:

After the jury convicted him Thursday evening on 34 felony counts in the hush money case, he stood in the dingy green hallway on the 15th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, huddling at length with his lawyers and aides.

Reporters who had been penned in the hallway all day waiting for him to appear called out questions to get a rise out of him:

How does it feel to be a convicted felon?”

“Are you worried about going to jail?”

The former president lumbered around the metal barricades with downcast eyes, then said … not much.

What he did say was his usual, tiresome litany:

“This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial,” he said.

“It’s a rigged trial, a disgrace,” he added seconds later.

“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” he said, a third time.

Furthermore, he said, “our whole country is being rigged” and “it’s just a disgrace.”

This was not the trial that carried the most severe consequences. Trump's enablers are working overtime to put those off. But this was the trial that exposed Trump as the bottom feeder he has always been -- and as the stupidest man who has ever been elected president.

If Americans re-elect him, they are truly the stupidest people on the planet.

Image: ABC News

The Trumpification of Language

 

Donald Trump is a vulgarian. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his use of language. Michael Harris writes:

Language is the basis of how societies mediate differences of opinion. The give and take of sweet reason that produces compromise comes in words.  

Language is the foundation of diplomacy, that, to paraphrase the late British prime minister Winston Churchill, substitutes words, words, words for war, war, war.

Words are the magic ingredients of books that give delight and breathe life into culture. In the hands of masters like Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Farley Mowat, they offer glimpses into worlds we would otherwise never see.

But these days it is not the language of reason or culture that dominates the national conversation. Everywhere you turn, you hear the angry, implacable, language of intolerance. That matters. The degradation of language is the degradation of society.

Trump hasn't just affected the language Americans use. He's affected our language as well:

During the “Freedom Convoy,” Canadians got a good look at the new vulgarity that is fast becoming the signature across so much of our politics.  

It is one thing to protest a particular government policy. That is a treasured right in any democracy. But carrying “Fuck Trudeau” signs has nothing to do with airing grievances. It is about promoting hate.  

Gumming up the national capital for three weeks, upending the lives of thousands of people in the process, is not protest. It is pandemonium.  

And when a national political leader takes doughnuts to the very people who wanted to change the government without the bother of an election, it endorses and reinforces the politics of confrontation and intimidation. It guarantees more “Fuck Trudeau” signs, more gravel-throwing, and who knows what else.     

Nor did Pierre Poilievre enhance his image as a statesman when he recently called the prime minister “wacko.” That language got him tossed out of the House of Commons, and forced a later apology. “Wacko”, by the way, is one of Donald Trump’s favourite pejoratives when he attacks his opponents. Just name-calling you say? Childish, but no big deal? Think again. 

It's not just that the language is vulgar. It has consequences:

A case in point. Trump and the GOP’s merciless verbal abuse of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a deranged, hammer-wielding, Pelosi-hater into the politician’s San Francisco home. When the attacker found out that the former Speaker was in Washington, D.C., he fractured the skull of Pelosi’s husband of 60 years, Paul Pelosi.

Intolerance, with violent overtones, has shown up in the strangest of places: American libraries. Language is at the centre of this unlikely development.  

It began with a very old story—the effort by some to segregate or remove books with “offensive” or “obscene” content from public libraries. That means anything dealing with sex or gender issues. Viewing culture through that horrible moral squint is what got To Kill a Mockingbird pulled from the curriculum by a British Columbia school board. As the saying goes: great books read you, you don’t read them.

“We had people threatening to burn down our building,” librarian Maegan Hanson said in an interview. The librarians think that the threats will only get worse now that Idaho Governor Brad Little has signed library content restrictions into law. The intolerance is increasingly becoming official.

Our salvation lies in not imitating him.

Image: Amazon.ca

Merrily We Go To Hell

Linda McQuaig writes that Canada is still in the grip of Big Oil:

The opening of the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion this month — widely celebrated in the media — reminds us that Canada is still very much in the grip of Big Oil.

That $34 billion expansion was financed by Ottawa and it amounts to a massive public subsidy for the oil industry — at a time when we should urgently be financing renewable energy, not fossil fuels.

The renowned U.S. climatologist James Hansen famously said the oilsands were such a “dirty, carbon-intensive” oil that if they were to be fully exploited, it would be “game over” for the planet.

We have been warned. Each summer brings more and more devastating forest fires -- While the cost of renewable energy plummets:

Renewables keep getting cheaper. The price of solar power has plunged by 90 per cent, yet Big Oil remains dominant.

That’s because, with its long-established monopoly and extensive government support, Big Oil is far more profitable — and therefore more attractive — to major financial investors than the struggling, competitive firms that make up the budding renewable sector, notes Brett Christophers, a political economist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Governments must become a lot more involved and they have to switch their loyalty from Big Oil to renewables.

Over the past four years, Ottawa has provided $65 billion in financial support for oil and gas, but only a fraction as much for renewable energy. Its main program for subsidizing renewables provides less than $1 billion a year, says Julia Levin, an associate director with Environmental Defence.

Now Ottawa is planning to spend $10 billion, possibly much more, subsidizing Big Oil’s futile but costly efforts to reduce its carbon emissions through “carbon capture and storage” — despite ample evidence the technology is highly ineffective at reducing such emissions.

This enables Big Oil to pretend it’s serious about reducing emissions, lulling Canadians into believing we’re making progress on climate, when we’re really just spinning our wheels and wasting a lot of public money in the process.

We keep pretending as merrily we go to hell.

Image: Green Queen

Abortion And A Rogue Supreme Court

In the United States, abortion will be on the ballot this year. Jennifer Rubin argues that the Supreme Court should also be on the ballot:

This year, abortion remains a powerful issue for Democrats. And the focus on abortion might also make the Supreme Court itself a top issue for Democrats in a presidential campaign for the first time in a generation. The radical Supreme Court that reversed Roe v. Wade is increasingly unpopular and scandal-ridden.

The importance of abortion — and, in turn, the Supreme Court responsible for overturning Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — marks a dramatic shift in the political landscape. In election after election going back to the early 1980s, Republicans used the Supreme Court to gin up their voters on a variety of issues, but especially on abortion. Democrats never really expected abortion access to disappear, so their presidential nominees did not rely as much on the Supreme Court to turn out their base. Now the tables are turned, at the very time the court has made a spectacle of itself.

Angst over the Supreme Court’s serial ethical blunders remind Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents that the problem is not just abortion but the court itself. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — who authored Dobbs and also committed arguably the worst ethical lapse on the court in memory — helps connect the dots for voters.

The court is clearly out of step with American voters:

This month, NPR reported on a Public Religion Research Institute poll showing that abortion rights remain extremely popular in the United States. “Nationwide, 64% percent of voters said abortion should be always or mostly legal; 35% said it should be always or mostly illegal. In most states — including states with Republican-controlled state governments — a majority of voters support legal abortion, and very few favor total bans.” Pro-choice advocates have won every abortion referendum since Dobbs, even in red states such as Ohio and Kansas. 

Like the court, the Republicans are clearly out of step with American voters. Understanding their problem, the Republicans have populated the majority of the court with their sympathizers. Like the upside-down flag that flew above Alito's house in January of 2021, it's clear there is a large number of Americans who believe that democracy is a quaint -- and useless -- idea.

Image: Democracy Now

An Age Of Nay Sayers

 Canada's political leaders are having a hard time. Lawrence Martin writes:

The Angus Reid Institute put out an analysis last week saying the leaders of Canada’s major federal political parties have never been held in such dismal regard. It was based on an analysis of 50 years of public-opinion data.

It’s the first time that all three major federal party leaders, the survey said, have garnered net ratings of negative 12 or worse at the same time.

The minus-12 rating – meaning the disapproval percentage is that many points higher than the approval one – belongs to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. By today’s standards, that’s actually a good rating. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh scores his worst ever ranking at minus-14. And, the study noted, “Prime Minister Trudeau’s approval has dropped to its lowest point at just 28 per cent, with a net approval of negative 38.”

Justin Trudeau's rating is about a lot of things. His "low standing stems from the housing crisis, inflation, immigration and his government’s incompetence as seen, for instance, in the ArriveCan app scandal. As well, there’s the fatigue factor, with his being in power almost nine years."

But for him and other leaders, we’re forgetting the elephant in the room: the burden of being at the helm in the online age. It’s often mentioned but not highlighted nearly enough. Owing to the internet and social media, political leaders are under bombardment from a gazillion more voices than they ever faced in the predigital era.

For the pall of unparalleled negativity that hangs over our politics, look to the naysayers, cynics, vilifiers and haters who have been handed microphones by virtue of this communications revolution. It’s been the catalyst for the disinformation epidemic, the rise of far right and left fringes, the debasement of the dialogue, the extreme polarization, the discrediting of the mainstream media, the erosion of trust in institutions.

With the comms system gone rogue, national leaders – provincial and civic leaders don’t have it so bad – can no longer influence, shape or control the message as they did before. Against the torrent of abuse, they have become more and more defenceless.

Compare the environment Justin Trudeau faces to that of his father. In Pierre Trudeau’s time, there was no internet, no relentless social-media attacks. The hard right barely existed, conservatives being of the more moderate Tory stripe. The more liberally inclined CBC had a far greater audience share. The right-wing Sun chain had yet to expand and conservative Postmedia had not yet been born.

Post-pandemic, we are in a very sour mood. Our darker angels are ascendant.

Image: Linked In

Who He And They Are

Yesterday, Donald Trump crossed the river over to New Jersey and held a rally. Marianne Levine reports:

 Donald Trump on Saturday insulted the prosecutor who has charged him in his ongoing New York criminal trial, speaking at a large rally on the Jersey Shore filled with personal attacks, coarse language and vulgar expressions from the former president and his supporters.

The presumptive Republican nominee called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “fat Alvin.” He described New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over his trial, as “highly conflicted.” And he reprised his accusations that both are “doing the bidding” of President Biden, even though there is no evidence they have coordinated with Biden or his administration.

The attacks were the latest show of defiance against judges and prosecutors from a candidate who is facing 88 criminal charges across four indictments. They were part of a flurry of broadsides or baseless claims that Trump and his backers launched during a beachside rally that marked a return to the campaign trail after at the end of another week when Trump spent much of his time in a courtroom.

He said he was indicted on “bulls---” prompting some in the crowd to repeat “bulls---” in response. He attacked former New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie, winking at the audience, “you cannot call him a fat pig.”

As Trump berated the Biden administration, he asked the crowd: “Everything they touch, turns to what?”

“S---!” the crowd responded.

At another point, as Trump complained about the news media, one rallygoer turned to the workspace for journalists, yelling: “You guys suck. F--- fake news. Go f--- yourselves.”

In Canada, we can do nothing about this looming disaster. Let's hope that Americans recognize who and what Trump and his supporters are.

 Image: The Washington Post

Championing Canada

It's easy to paint Pierre Poilievre as the Trump of the North. His "everything is broken" meme is right out of Trump's playbook. But Robin Sears writes that turning Poilievre into a mini-Trump cheapens Canadian politics:

Justin Trudeau must avoid the temptation to paint Poilievre as a Trump mini-me. It only cheapens our politics, ironically, in a pure Trumpian manner.

Far better to champion Canada, surely. Not only is Canada not broken, we this week succeeded at getting the world’s first serious draft agreement on reducing plastics near the finish line. Our role was central, professional and won global praise.

Federal NPD leader Jagmeet Singh and the prime minister would be better off declaring they are proud Canadians. They are proud of how well we have defended our institutions; those with a greater investment in their personal grievances — premiers and their backers — than in securing democracy.

We are proud of what Canadians have pioneered in immigrant integration, AI and quantum technology, in climate change, in progress on indigenous reconciliation, and on and on.

Trump is all about denigrating his country:

In Canada, it has not been about denigrating the country — until now.

It has not been about adolescent vulgarisms in personal attacks — until now.

Coming from a man whose life achievement is limited to a few weeks as a junior minister in the cabinet of a dying government and two decades as a publicly paid opposition MP, it is somewhat galling.

While acknowledging all our deficits and the work remaining to do, we are proud of Canada. Most of us do not want to hear it described as completely broken. 

The goings on in Trump's New York trial reveal just how sleezy a character Trump is. 

Let's not go there.

Image: The Toronto Star

Who Would Replace Him?

There's lots of talk these days about Justin Trudeau resigning. Michael Harris writes:

With Trudeau having notched three electoral victories since 2015, nobody is going to push him out — at least not yet. After all, with a handsome face and a famous name, he took the Liberals from political oblivion to a majority government in 2015. But confronted with his own deepening unpopularity, will Trudeau himself step down?

That is what the summer of 2024 is all about — whether Trudeau will take a walk in the sand, as his father famously took one in the snow before resigning. Will Justin decide that for the good of the party, it’s time to make room for a new leader?

There is every reason for the PM to feel conflicted. Trudeau prides himself on his toughness. Remember how everyone thought that Sen. Patrick Brazeau would knock the stuffing out of him in their boxing match? It would be personally difficult for Trudeau to walk away from a fight with a man for whom he has so little respect, a man whose values mirror those of Stephen Harper.

There is precedent for resigning for the good of the party:

After nine years in power, for the good of that same party, all signs point to the wisdom of a Trudeau resignation sometime this year. That way, the new PM would have a chance to showcase his abilities before heading into an election in 2025.

The Liberal house is on fire, and the task at hand is to save as much of the furniture as possible. Trudeau must decide if he is the one to do that at a time when he personally trails both Poilievre and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh in the polls.

The bottom line here? Justin Trudeau is not nearly as bad as his detractors claim, often in personal and reprehensible ways. But politics is not Sunday school. Perception, not reality, governs the game. Messaging and narratives, rather than the facts, ultimately carry the day.

Once the electorate sours on a leader, as the evidence shows it has on Trudeau, all faults are amplified and all accomplishments largely ignored. We have all but reached the anybody-but-Trudeau point in national politics, thanks to a relentless personal attack on the PM that goes well beyond policy differences and politics.

Who would replace him? Dominic Leblanc's and Mark Carney's names are being bruited about. But nothing will happen until Trudeau resigns.

Image: CTV News

Who He Is

You know a man by the company he keeps. Consider this from Althia Raj:

Perhaps Poilievre thought he had little to risk when he decided to stop and say hello to an encampment at the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border, where a group of citizens, surrounded by weathered Canadian and “F— Trudeau” flags, was protesting the carbon levy.

In videos made by the protesters and circulated on social media, you can see Poilievre come out of a trailer with the flag of Diagolon — a far-right, white nationalist group described as “extremist” by the U.S. State Department — drawn on the side.

Poilievre may not have known what he was walking into when he stopped for a sunset visit. (In 2022, after he was criticized for posing for a handshake photo with Diagolon’s founder Jeremy MacKenzie, he complained to police the group had discussed sexually assaulting his wife, Anaida Poilievre, on a podcast.)

But after arriving on site, speaking to demonstrators, and seeing their symbols, Poilievre assured them that, “Everyone is happy with what you’re doing.”

This kind of stuff isn't new:

It recalled moments during the Conservative leadership race when former Quebec premier Jean Charest tore into Poilievre’s support for the so-called “Freedom Convoy.”

“You cannot make laws and break laws, and then say, ‘I will make laws for other people.’ I’m sorry, but that is a question of basic foundation of principles in my life,” he told Poilievre.

Charest was loudly booed. But he likely represented a mainstream view. You can believe the Liberal government went too far with mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, or oppose its use as a divisive wedge during the last campaign, but supporting a group that takes over the capital’s downtown, shuts down businesses, and puts thousands of people out of work so the protesters can party in the streets, intimidate residents, and blast truck horns at all hours of the night for weeks, is not something that should be tolerated, let alone encouraged or celebrated by political leaders.

Poilievre and his followers are telling us who they are.

Caveat emptor.

Image: Press Progress

An Intergenerational Battle

 

A battle is brewing between Canada's generations. Max Fawcett writes:

Young Canadians can be forgiven for being a bit confused by the latest federal budget. For the first time in their lives, they’re looking at a budget that explicitly tries to cater to their needs and interests — and listening to politicians fighting for their votes. If their growing political power wasn’t apparent to them before, it should be now.

As Generation Squeeze noted in its analysis, “Never before has the Government of Canada formally acknowledged that hard work isn’t paying off for younger Canadians today the way it did for previous generations. Budget 2024 labels this sad reality as the starting point for a new economic framework to achieve ‘Fairness for Every Generation.’” At long last, young Canadians are getting their moment in the political sun.

The problem is that the budget doesn't do enough:

While the Liberal budget does more to address intergenerational inequality for younger people than any in Canadian history, it still doesn’t do nearly enough. According to Generation Squeeze, Budget 2024 increases spending for Old Age Security by $31 billion and sends an additional $17 billion toward health care, which is used disproportionately by those over 65. But it only allocates $2 billion towards housing, with an additional $8 billion for measures aimed at building a clean economy. The intergenerational balance is still badly skewed, in other words.

It may yet get worse, too. As more boomers exit the workforce and the ratio of working-age residents to retirees continues to decline from the high of seven-to-one in the 1970s to just three-to-one today, the pressure on today’s taxpayers will only continue to grow. Young Canadians are paying the price for the failure of previous generations to properly plan for this demographic inevitability, and it’s one the Conservative Party of Canada seems determined to ignore. As Generation Squeeze’s analysis concluded, “Any party promising to balance the budget easily without tax increases or gutting spending on retirees ignores this hard truth.”

The result seems to be that no one is happy:

Derek Holt, the vice-president and head of capital markets at Scotiabank, went even further than that. “[Justin] Trudeau and [Chrystia] Freeland are ripping off Canada’s youth who will be the ones left to face the bills for many years to come,” he wrote in a recent column in the Globe and Mail, one of many he’s written of late attacking the government. “It’s an insult to portray such a budget as being in the best interests of Canada’s youth who have fled from the Liberals in droves.”

The bigger insult, though, is older Canadians using the supposed long-term well-being of young people as a stalking horse for their own near-term self-interest. Conservatives have been doing this for decades, of course, talking up the risks associated with deficits and debts while studiously ignoring the ever-expanding price tag associated with climate change.

How will this be resolved? I confess I don't know.

Image: Quote Fancy

It's About Over-Extraction

The Liberals say that their budget is about restoring generational fairness. Some economists say that the problem is over-extraction. Evan Dyer writes:

"Income matters less than it used to. Access to secure housing matters so much more," said Paul Kershaw, a professor at the UBC School of Population and Public Health and founder of the group Generation Squeeze, which lobbies for what it calls "intergenerational equity."

Kershaw said his own Vancouver home is an example of how real estate consolidates wealth.

"I've gained about a million and a half in wealth in the last 20 years while I've been watching TV, cleaning in the kitchen and sleeping," he said. "And that's coming at the expense of a younger person being able to be just as smart as me, just as hardworking as me, but who now can't live where I do."

Kershaw said he's seen his students struggle "to get the degrees that are necessary to compete for jobs that don't pay as much as in the past. And then they face home prices that are up to a staggering level, which means they have to pay more for rent because they're locked out of ownership.

Kershaw said the housing shortage is just one example of "over-extraction" by the boomer generation.

"Climate change reflects the over-extraction of the atmosphere's ability to absorb carbon," he said. "We've done that over the last many decades. Now the legacy is extreme weather for those who follow in our footsteps."

Many young people are despondent about environmental degradation and climate change. Those fears are compounded by anxiety about their own economic futures.

"The third example of over-extraction," Kershaw told CBC News "is over-extraction of the revenue produced from economic growth.

"The fastest-growing part of the federal budget is spending on Old Age Security. The second-fastest part is the Canada Health Transfer, half of which goes to the 20 per cent of the population that's over 65."

Back in the 1950's Ayn Rand wrote a little book entitled Selfishness As A Virtue. By the early 1980's policy makers began to build in economic incentives based on her ideas. We are living in a world Rand helped to create. It will take a while to reverse what has happened over the last forty years.

But one thing is for certain: If the young buy what Pierre Poilievre is selling, they'll get more of the same.

Image: Radio Canada

In The Gutter

Craig Wallace writes that you can't run a country on outrage and insults. But that, apparently, is what Pierre Poilievre intends to do. Wallace writes:

If recent polls remain the same, sometime between now and October 2025 Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) Leader Pierre Poilievre will become Canada’s next prime minister.

If the CPC does take power, it will be interesting to see what type of government they will be.

Certainly it is hard to tell, as to date they appear to have no plan as to how they will govern. They have released no policies on climate change outside of opposing the current carbon tax and vowing to eliminate it. What would they replace it with, or do they even believe in climate change? The CPC won’t say. They denounce the current state of the Canadian military, however they refuse to outline their own plan on how to rebuild our armed forces. What will they do with taxes? Who knows?

One area we know a CPC government will continue to embrace is anger and an utter lack of class and decorum. For example, on April 4 veteran New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus announced he will not seek re-election in the next federal election after more than 20 years in Parliament. For the record, I rarely agreed with Mr. Angus’s politics, but I greatly admired his support for the First Nations and his outstanding ability to represent his constituents. (In 2006 the Toronto Star selected him as one of the 10 top opposition MPs and in 2012 Macleans magazine voted him as one of the 25 most influential Canadians.)

So how did Poilievre react to this news? On X (previously known as Twitter) Poilievre tweeted, “Charlie Angus jumps ship rather than face voters after he voted to hike the carbon tax and ban the hunting rifles of Northern Ontarians. Common sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, stop the crime — and let you keep your hunting rifle.”

That's Poilievre in a nutshell: no class and no grace. But he's not the only one:

Conservative MP Stephanie Kusie commented “I’d like to thank the member for Timmins-James Bay for relieving us of our misery and announcing his resignation. Thank you so much; I truly appreciate that. You know, we’re all gonna really miss him on this side of the House. Not!”

Conservative leaders used to be statesmen:

Conservative leaders were not always this crass. Here in Ontario in the last 70 years we saw highly successful, dignified premiers in Leslie Frost, John Robarts and Bill Davis. All of them were policy driven, made decisions based on objective evidence and logic and behaved in classy, dignified ways.

Federally in my life time, while not as successful as the Ontario premiers, Conservative Party leaders Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark stood out for their decency and well thought out detailed policy alternatives. Recently deceased Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney was renowned for his kindness and class. People from all over the political spectrum spoke about how Mulroney reached out to them when they were in a time of need. One wonders why Poilievre and his party feel it is necessary to behave as uncouth boors so much of the time.

Today's Conservatives live in the gutter.

Image: Justin Tang/Canadian Press

Today's The Day

Today's the day Donald Trump goes to criminal court. Jennifer Rubin writes:

The day has finally arrived for the historic trial in Manhattan of Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business documents. The case concerns Trump’s scheme to conceal embarrassing information from voters in the 2016 election. Derided as a “rump” case, or “trivial,” it actually may be the most consequential of the four criminal cases facing the former president.

“This is the case that reflects the efforts Trump went through to influence the 2016 election — and it worked. He won the election,” says Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who worked for decades in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “And he only won by a slim margin of fewer than 80,000 votes in three swing states.” Trump sought to buy off two women who said they had sexual encounters with him (Trump denies that) because he not unreasonably feared he would lose if, in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape, these allegations came out.

Some people claim that the case is a storm in a teacup. Not so, writes Rubin:

If you doubt the importance of this case, consider an alternate history: Trump never silenced these women, Hillary Clinton won, three right-wing justices did not get appointed, Roe v. Wade remained law, and Trump never had the chance to attempt a coup in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Much depended on the facts set out in the indictment.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not changed his theory of the case. What’s changed is the slow realization among commentators that the case revolves around allegations that, if proven true in court, will amount to Trump’s first — and only successful attempt — to use deception and illegal means to gain power.

To begin, we can never prove that “but for” the payoff scheme Trump would have lost. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “It’s inherent in the nature of things and the limits of human knowledge that one can never demonstrate with certainty how history would have unfolded had one or another pivotal event, including an obviously crucial deception of tens of millions of people who hadn’t yet come to expect the worst of Mr. Trump, not occurred.”

But if any crime in pursuit of office would be deemed the decisive event in 2016 and beyond, Tribe said, “the felonies charged by Alvin Bragg in the New York prosecution that is about to unfold in real time qualify for that designation.”

In sum, the case that begins today is not frivolous, minor or particularly prurient. To the contrary, the first trial of a former president has grave importance as a means of holding Trump accountable for the scheme that lifted him to power. It marks the first instance of Trump maneuvering to win an election through deception. To boot, a multi-count felony conviction might result in prison time. That may explain why Trump has been so desperate to delay it.

Exactly. This is the case that set the whole sad saga off. We await a decision.

Image: The Washington Post

Idiocy -- Pure And Simple

Arizona women are now living with an anti-abortion law that was passed in 1864, before they had the right to vote. Dana Milbank writes:

Trump accurately boasts that “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade” and “I was proudly the person responsible.” As a result of his achievement, conservatives on Arizona’s Supreme Court, freed by Roe’s demise, resurrected on Tuesday an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, from the moment of conception. Trump invited just such Wild West jurisprudence the day before when he said abortion policy should be left “up to the states.” Now, Arizona has restored women’s health care to an era when bloodletting and mercury pills were the standard of care and patients had limbs sawed off without anesthesia.

During the same week Trump took credit for what happened in Arizona, he compared himself to Nelson Mandela:

After all, the similarities are uncanny!

Mandela led the African National Congress. Trump led white nationalists to attack Congress.

Mandela did 18 years of hard labor on Robben Island. Trump made the hard decisions for 14 seasons on “The Apprentice.”

Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk for abolishing apartheid. Trump won both the Club Championship trophy and Senior Club Championship trophy at Trump International Golf Club.

Mandela built the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to heal South Africa. Trump built Truth Social after he got kicked off of Twitter.

You get the point. This is sheer idiocy.

Image: CBC

The Dumbest

 Max Fawcett writes that Doug Ford is dumbing down Ontario:

At an announcement for a new medical school at York University, Ford suggested that he wanted to get rid of all the province’s international post-secondary students. It does not appear to have occurred to Ford that those students currently make up 18 per cent of the student body at Ontario’s colleges and universities or that they’ve helped keep these institutions afloat after Ford’s government cut tuition by 10 per cent in 2019 and kept it frozen there ever since. “I’m not being mean, but I’m taking care of our students, our kids first,” he said. “I want 100 per cent of Ontario students going to these universities.”

This is the sort of narrow-minded parochialism you might expect from Quebec’s government, not Ontario’s. But then, even describing Ford’s remarks as parochial gives them credit they don’t deserve since it presumes he’s at least thought about the issues at play for more than a few seconds. As The Canadian Press reported, “Ford then lamented the fact that some kids and parents have said some Ontario students study abroad and then do not return home after they meet someone.”

That’s right: Ford is willing to risk bankrupting his province’s post-secondary institutions because sometimes people leave Ontario to study and don’t return. And while Ford will walk this back in due course, it’s just the latest demonstration of his monumental intellectual shortcomings that are turning the province he governs into a second-rate echo of its former self.

Ford takes the same position when it comes to housing:

Nowhere is that more apparent than on the housing front, where Ford’s enthusiasm for building housing quickly evaporated after it became clear he couldn’t use it to enrich developers and other friends and donors. First, he made it clear he wasn’t about to allow municipalities to build fourplexes as a right, in part because he doesn’t even seem to understand what a fourplex is. “You go in the little communities and start putting up four-storey, six-storey, eight-storey buildings right deep into the communities, there's going to be a lot of shouting and screaming. That's a massive mistake.”

An even bigger mistake would be turning down the federal government’s new offer of billions of dollars for housing simply because you don’t want to meet their conditions, but that’s exactly what Ford sounds like he'll do. Ford has tried to defend this indefensible decision on the basis that he won’t tell local governments what to do, but as David Moscrop pointed out in a piece for TVO, his government has done just that in issuing almost 10 times as many MZOs (minister’s zoning orders) since 2019 as the previous Liberal government did during its 15 years in power.

“The government has no problem meddling in municipal planning,” Moscrop wrote. “Its problem is that it hates urban density, preferring single-family homes and the occasional townhouse.” This is the height of self-defeating stupidity when you’re in the midst of a housing crisis, and it’s even dumber when the federal government is offering you billions of dollars to do the things your own housing affordability task force already recommended.

This week the Ford government announced that it would include nursing home rooms as new houses when counting the number of homes built. I don't know who is Canada's worst premier. But Ford gets my vote as the dumbest. 

Image: Toronto Life

A Weird, Weird World

Fifty years ago, Louis Armstrong had a big hit singing "What A Wonderful World." That song doesn't characterize the world we live in. Susan Riley writes:

Anyone looking for evidence that we live in a post-policy, post-fact, increasingly incoherent political moment only needs to look at the war against the federal carbon tax. It isn’t just that it appears to be succeeding; worse, it is drowning out serious conversations about climate change and other urgent issues.

It is a case study in how politics works now: how ambitious attempts—or claims, if you prefer—to improve the economy and life of Canadians become a bludgeon, or an albatross, in a war for political power.

Facts support the tax:

Fact one: the tax, as has been amply documented, contributes less than one per cent to the national inflation rate, which itself has been steadily declining. It is expected to reach the Bank of Canada’s preferred two per cent level this year. And, as is repeatedly noted, some 80 per cent of households that pay the carbon tax get a quarterly rebate—the Canada carbon rebate—which more than compensates for increased costs at the pump or for home heating.

Less well-advertised fact: according to one recent study from the independent Canada Climate Institute, the carbon tax on individual consumption will lower greenhouse gas emissions from eight to 14 per cent in coming years—a modest gain, especially compared to the less visible levy on big industrial polluters. That one will be responsible for 20 to 48 per cent of reductions by 2030. However, the same report says both measures—and others, including levies on methane pollution, and a long-awaited cap on oilsands emissions—are required to reach a desired 50 per cent reduction by the end of the decade.

And, for those wondering, the institute says emissions have been on a downward trend since 2005, with a slight uptick last year. According to its analysis, Canada is on track to meet 90 cent of the current government’s emissions reduction target by 2030—which should be a useful fact to exploit. But why isn’t Justin Trudeau and his cabinet letting Canadians in on the secret?

Unfortunately, the Liberals have bungled the messaging:

The delivery of federal climate measures has been so bungled, so half-hearted, that the fact-free enemies of climate action—various conservative premiers, federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre—are winning the communications war. Poilievre’s schoolyard chants (Axe the Tax/Spike the Hike) drown out the clear-eyed consensus of some 300 “so-called experts”—prominent economists of all persuasions—who explained recently that the hated carbon tax is the least costly, most effective, way of pricing pollution, and, by extension, of moving consumers away from fossil fuels to cleaner alternatives.

Initially, Ottawa hid the rebate in annual tax filings. Then it deposited it directly into bank accounts as the Canada Climate Initiative Payment—which probably left as many recipients puzzled as pleased. It finally hit upon the more accurate Canada Carbon Rebate, delivered at regular intervals, but it may be too late to penetrate the mesh of lies surrounding the mostly innocuous carbon tax.

No one wants facts. They spoil a good protest. 

Pierre Poilievre isn't the only one piling on the carbon tax:

While Poilievre has preferred rhyming couplets to impartial analysis, many premiers and other actors are feeding the bonfire of inanities so successfully stroked by Poilievre. They have bought into the lie, too—even though some, including Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, are on record as once touting a consumer carbon tax as the most effective way of reducing emissions. But public opinion has shifted, and so, apparently, have the facts. 

Not all premiers reject climate action outright; Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Manitoba are talking about producing their own climate plans that probably will not include a consumer tax—but, in the meantime, climate progress could be hard to discern through the wildfire smoke. 

That said, the federal Liberals cannot be accused—like the Conservatives—of not having a climate policy. They have one. It has several elements, all too wordy for an election placard: financial help for purchasers of new electric cars (which remain too expensive for many), some relief for those switching from oil and gas to heat pumps for home heating, public transit funding, and other niche offerings. But you need to act quickly while supplies last.

A popular green home-retrofit program, for example, which offered grants and low-cost loans to anyone intrepid enough to navigate the paperwork, was so popular it was halted last December. A new version, tailored to low-and-middle income earners, is in the works, but, meanwhile, installers and homeowners have been left dangling.

The outlook isn't good -- for Canada and the planet.

Image: One Accounting

Here Come The Nutbars

InfoWars nutbar Alex Jones has endorsed Pierre Poilievre. Emily Leedham writes:

Pierre Poilievre has earned a new admirer — conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Jones, who regularly promotes conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric through his website InfoWars, took time during a recent broadcast to heap praise on Canada’s newly elected Conservative leader.

During an interview with John Birch Society Program Director Robert Owens, Jones identified Poilievre as one of the leaders of a “rising” global far-right movement that is challenging the “New World Order.”

According to Jones, those far-right leaders include Canada’s new Conservative leader as well as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Italian President Georgia Meloni.

“As negative as things are, we got Bolsonaro, we got Georgia Meloni in Italy, we got the new Canadian leader who’s set to beat Trudeau — who is totally anti-New World Order,” Jones said on his September 30 broadcast.

“You look all over the world, we are rising right now.”

Just what the world needs. Ask the Sandy Hook parents of the kids who were gunned down there. They are still chasing Jones to pay up on the judgment they were awarded for the lies he told about what happened there. 

Caveat emptor.

Image: Press Progress